Posts Filed Under software

Organizations across the news industry are exploring ways to use generative AI to support their storytelling (many shared on this very blog). A growing trend is to use these new tools on the other end of the production cycle, to support content audits that assess a large set of stories ...

We recently co-hosted the Computation + Journalism Symposium 2024 at Northeastern, bringing together academics, journalists, data scientists, editors, and more to explore innovate work at the intersection of fields. Keynotes from Julia Angwin, Aaron Sankin, and Alan Mislove.

How effective are existing tools for extracting author information from global online news? Author extracton is a key task in media research that supports a number of different types of research questions. We’ve hesitated to support this broadly in Media Cloud, because our past evaluati...

So excited to announce that we’ve received a grant to support our work on the Counterdata Network from the Data Empowerment Fund. Our project builds on a powerful legacy—think of Ida B. Wells using news to expose lynchings in the late 1800s. Today, we’re continuing this tradition by dev...

We’re thrilled to announce that Media Cloud has secured new NSF HNDS-I grant to take our global news archive and director to the next level! This grant enables us to extend and enhance our searchable news database, which currently includes nearly 2 billion documents. With this funding, ...

The latest Zelda game is being covered a lot more in Democrat-serving online news sites. That’s one of the first random tidbits I noticed in “On Our Own Terms”, a new tool built by Claire Pan and I as part of the Media Could project.

We’ll be presenting our collaborative work on the Data Against Feminicide project at the 2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency. We’re very excited to put forward this work as a case study in intersectional feminist and participatory approaches to machine learn...

Computers are good at processing large amounts of information, but bad at intuiting what that information actually is. For an ongoing research project looking at mentions of food in online media, we’re trying to help computers get better at recognizing entities in unstructured text. Giv...

I’ll be speaking at the 2022 Computation + Journalism conference, hosted at Columbia University from June 9-11. I’ll be presenting a paper on the software architecture supporting the Data Against Feminicide project.

The use of embedded content from Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and other platforms has grown to become a norm in online news content. When these platforms emerged journalists employed existing industry norms to treat them like traditional sources - content that needed verification, vetting,...

Computational generative design is a fascinating space available to those with access to coding skills and prototyping machines such as laser cutters and 3d printers. But what happens at the intersections of simple computational design and traditional craft disciplines? We were interest...

The switch to remote learning during the Covid pandemic has been challenging for educators of all stripes, and those trying to teach data storytelling have been no exception. Many of our data literacy activities in their current form are dependent on robust small-group discussion and re...

AR has emerged as a popular approach to interacting with technology - creators are leveraging it for video games, educational experiences, live filters and more. We are motivated by this development to explore how AR is being used for pro-social communication. What can AR offer to thing...